I live blogged Astro I, but then my battery ran out. I have handwritten notes from Astro II.

International Year of Astronomy 2009Liz Bryson talked about the aims of this effort and what's going on with it right now. Apparently they hadn't even considered including astro librarians in the planning. Liz will make sure our voices are heard :)More information on the web site: http://www.astronomy2009.org

Somehow mentioned, but not related to the above, was Google Sky.Some of our members are collaborating on this. It's like Google Earth, but for everything else (there's already a Moon and a Mars). Coordinate systems are pretty tricky. I guess they're using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and will allow you to browse constellations and other things. I guess they're offering to host large datasets and send out hard drives? (not sure what this means exactly)

Status of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center LibraryPete Banholzer brought us up to date (as of when he left to come to SLA, but things are in constant flux). They have been told to emphasize engineering, not science, and will be reducing their print collection by about 50%. This is fairly difficult because of the the requirements when getting rid of "government property" and also because they'll have to do it very, very quickly. A horrifying quote that I've heard before... some important person over there said in 2005: "the library is an unaffordable luxury." On a positive note, they are working toward a NASA-wide virtual library.

Getting people to interact with the library- allow food (mixed responses on this)- serve food (universally agreed upon tactic)- new book shelf- virtual new book shelf

This is my blog on library and information science. I'm into Sci/Tech libraries, special libraries, personal information management, sci/tech scholarly comms.... My name is Christina Pikas and I'm a librarian in a physics, astronomy, math, computer science, and engineering library. I'm also a doctoral student at Maryland. Any opinions expressed here are strictly my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer or CLIS. You may reach me via e-mail at cpikas {at} gmail {dot} com.